I have an external NTFS hdd connected to my Mac via USB. I understand that I can only read this drive in OS X/can't save anything to it, and that's fine. But it seems this behavior is carried through into Parallels! I have this drive set up as a shared folder, and just like in OS X I can access its contents, but cannot write to it. That's a bit of a disappointment, as my intent is to use this drive to work with Windows files. Is there a way writing to an external NTFS partition can be enabled in the VM?
As a rule, whenever I use non Microsoft operating systems, I format my drives to be used by the other operating systems as FAT32. That way I need not worry about the write restictions on NTFS (even though I am limited to 4Gb filesizes on FAT32) I think your problem relates to the fact that it is in essence still Mac OS trying to write to NTFS, and not XP as such
FAT32 is not a good option for me. My Outlook pst file is >5Gb. I may just go ahead and reformat the drive as HFS. I will be able to use it with my Windows laptop since I have MacDrive 6 installed on it. It's just that copying the 100K or so files back and forth will take some time. I was hoping I would not have to do this.
If Outlook is your only problem, my solution would be to abandon it and its well deserved reputation as the world's best virus delivery system, and switch to something like Eudora Pro which uses many files for mailboxes and does not use the IE HTML renderer, increasing safety by a couple of orders of magnitude and solving the large file problem in one fell swoop. Of course if you're locked into Exchange, you're sort of shafted. Parallels does not attach disk partitions directly, so anything you can do to a disk partition from a guest must be something the host can do on its own. They have said this may change in a future release, but for now if it isn't host writable, it isn't guest writable.
I had an 300GB external drive formatted as NTFS, that wouldn't work on the MAC OS side. I backed up everything (using another external, a network drive we have on our home network and some DVDs) and reformatted the drive for MAC. I then copied everything back onto the drive, made it a shared drive in Parallels and now I have no problem saving to it or reading from it from either Mac OS or my Windows VM. It was a pain and took several days, but it works fine now.
